The reach of distributed computing and storage resources has steadily grown, and it is believed that this trend will continue into the future. For instance, Smart Connected Communities will have highly distributed resources including both mobile and non-mobile devices, such as at the level of rooms, floors, buildings, outdoors, etc. These resources can perform a variety of functions related to processing, storing data generated by various sensors and actuator devices as well as interacting and collaborating in a peer-to-peer/peer-to-group manner. Moreover, future mobile as well as non-mobile applications will generate highly dynamic loads with respect to compute power, geographic location and data volume. Edge-computing resources can be used to considerably improve latency, location relevance, real-time and cost performance.
To take advantage of this changing paradigm, current data-centric cloud management is not adequate. For example, elastic cloud management tools (e.g., provisioning, allocation) assume resources to be clustered, running on “demilitarized zones” (DMZ) inside the firewalls and further assume network bandwidth to be high and predictable. On the contrary, the future distributed resources will be highly dynamic in their availability and their location, e.g., within a connected community. Network reachability to these resources will thus be varying and security will be a challenge due to their operation inside and outside of various security boundaries.